On the Parentage of Aradia
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Posted in Essays • September 22, 2023
What follows is an extremely unpolished bit of speculative thealogy.1 I wrote it in a fit of inspiration earlier today — and by "wrote", I mean "spammed my friend with it in our text chat, then copied and pasted my wall of text and called it an essay." I've made some minor edits for clarity's sake, but it's still a pretty rough draft. I might clean it up into something more respectable later on, but for now, giving myself permission to publish messy things is the only way I can get myself to publish anything at all, so messy it is. Content warnings for discussion of sex and pregnancy, and one brief reference to mythological incest, though nothing explicit. And with that, onward!
So, thealogical question I've been pondering: who is Aradia's second parent?
Aradia, if you're not familiar, is a figure from Italian folklore who has become an important deity in modern paganism. Aradia is said to be the daughter of the goddess Diana (the Roman equivalent of Artemis), and to be worshiped by witches alongside her mother. She came to widespread attention in 1899 when the folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland published the book Aradia, or, the Gospel of the Witches. In this book, Aradia is a liberator figure, who was sent to Earth by her mother Diana to teach the peasants witchcraft in order to free them from oppression by the nobility and the Christian church. Leland claimed that this was the sacred text of a group of pagan witches in Tuscany whose practice had survived since ancient times, and that it was given to him by his informant, an Italian woman named Maddalena (her last name is not recorded). There's debate among historians about how much of the text is derived from a genuine folk tradition, how much was invented by Maddalena, and how much was invented by Leland himself, but if I understand correctly, the consensus seems to be that it's a mix of all of the above. Aradia is most likely an authentic part of Italian folklore, but there's little evidence that she was worshiped in any organized way prior to the publication of Leland's text. However, she very much is worshiped today; Leland's text was one of the main sources that Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente drew on in their creation of Wicca, and she subsequently found her way into much of modern pagan practice from there.
Pre-Leland sources, to the best of my knowledge, don't record who Aradia's other parent was (if indeed she had one). Leland's book, however, says that Aradia was the child of Diana and her brother Lucifer. Lucifer, before becoming a name for the Christian devil, originally referred to a minor Roman deity associated with the morning star (ie, the planet Venus as seen at dawn).
However, this parentage for Aradia has never quite made sense to me.
In traditional Greek and Roman mythology, Diana/Artemis was a virgin goddess, which in Greek and Roman culture meant that she never had romantic or sexual relationships with men (including male gods). While mythology and religious practice can and do evolve over time, this is such a central and consistent attribute of Diana's character that changing it feels incredibly suspect to me — it feels like doing away with a pretty central part of what makes Diana herself. So it's hard for me to imagine Diana conceiving a child with Lucifer, or any other male deity.
However, her being a virgin under the Greco-Roman definition did not preclude her being romantically and/or sexually intimate with other women. The myths vary a bit on this front — while some portray her as (what we would now call) aroace, others portray her as very explicitly lesbian. No doubt it varied from time to time and place to place, but both interpretations are historically and mythologically justifiable. When it comes to gods, many things can be true at once, after all. And if we admit of the lesbian interpretation, it opens up some interesting possibilities.
Let's take Leland's text as our starting point. Since he posits Lucifer as Aradia's other parent, let's consider other deities associated with the planet Venus and/or the dawn. In Greco-Roman mythology, the planet Venus was primarily associated with — who else? — Venus, or Aphrodite, goddess of love. As for the dawn goddess, I typically refer to her by her Germanic name Eostre, but she also shows up in Greek mythology as Eos, and Roman mythology as Aurora.2
Venus/Aphrodite was historically depicted as having an ithyphallic aspect, so it would make thematic sense for her to be the one to impregnate Diana and conceive Aradia. The historical case for Eostre in this role is admittedly sparser, but for whatever it's worth I do have pretty strong UPG3 of her having an ithyphallic aspect as well. (And Aphrodite and Eos were also sometimes conflated with each other as well, for whatever that's worth.)
I first came to this UPG about Eostre because she appeared to me that way in a meditation, but it immediately made intuitive sense based on what I know of her mythos. Her primary domains are the dawn and the springtime — both beginnings. She's often described as a fertility goddess, but I don't see her as a gestationally fertile figure per se — as the goddess of dawn and spring, she seems to be more the one who initiates the process of growth than the one who sustains it, so it makes more symbolic sense to me for her to be the one impregnating than the one becoming pregnant.
(As a side note, modern pagans also often associate Eostre with estrogen. This association originally came from the idea that Eostre's name is the etymological origin of the word estrogen, which does not seem to be true (the "estr-" in estrogen actually comes from the Greek word for gadfly), but while the linguistic connection may be spurious, the spiritual connection makes perfect sense to me. Why wouldn't the goddess of the dawn be associated with the dawn of womanhood? Accordingly, I often pray to Eostre when I take my estrogen pills in the morning.)
Anyway, I'm still thinking over what it would mean for Aphrodite and/or Eostre to be Aradia's non-gestational mother, but it's an intriguing concept at the very least. I'm thinking of a passage in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite that says that Artemis is one of the few beings whom Aphrodite has no power over. This is sometimes used as evidence for an interpretation of Artemis in which she does not engage in romantic intimacy of any sort, but — without denying the validity of that reading — we can also consider an alternate reading in which, while Aphrodite has no power over Artemis, Artemis can still approach her on her own terms, of her own free will.
Aphrodite is the goddess of romantic and sexual love in all its forms. Artemis/Diana, while perhaps best known as a goddess of animals, hunting, and the wilderness, is also a goddess of the moon, and of women's sovereignty and autonomy. And Aradia, as mentioned before, is a goddess of liberation and resistance to oppression. Taken together, one message this suggests is that liberation requires, not forcibly abstaining from intimate relationships, but approaching them deliberately on one's own terms. Radical queer liberation rather than the enforced celibacy of "political lesbianism", one might say.
(This should not be taken as a slight to aro and/or ace people, of course — choosing not to engage in particular forms of intimacy because one is genuinely happier without them still constitutes approaching them on one's own terms. One's own terms can absolutely include saying "nope, not for me!")
I haven't explored the possibility of an Eostre/Diana relationship quite as deeply as the possibility of an Aphrodite/Diana one yet (and again, given the connections between Eostre and Aphrodite, those possibilities are not mutually exclusive), but the juxtaposition of solar and lunar symbolism does at least suggest an interesting theme of liberation through balance and completeness (compare with the themes of the Temperance card in tarot).
On a semi-related note, another question I've been pondering is: why is Brigid's festival before Eostre's? Brigid is a Celtic goddess of fire, healing, poetry, and crafts (especially metalsmithing), and her holy day is Imbolc, the cross-quarter day between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Eostre's holy day is the spring equinox itself. Eostre, as I mentioned above, is to me a goddess of beginnings, while Brigid is a goddess of growth, transformation, and completion — her themes all seem to center around things changing in order to reach their potential — so logically, one might expect Eostre's celebration to be earlier in the year than Brigid's.
The literal historical answer, of course, is that these goddesses developed separately from each other, and it's only in modern times that Brigid and Eostre are worshiped alongside each other, and that their festivals are celebrated by the same people. But that still leaves the question of why this particular syncretism, out of all the possibilities, is the one that has become most common today, and what insights we can draw if we read it symbolically/esoterically.
My personal answer is that the completion of any one process is always the beginning of another. Brigid nurtures the dormant plants and hibernating animals through the winter and prepares them to awaken in the spring, and as they complete that phase in the yearly cycle, Eostre blesses them and welcomes them into the next phase.